Theatre Portfolio: Gecko Theatre Company

Who are they?

· They are an international theatre company based in the UK.

· It was founded in 2001

· Amit Lahav is the Artistic Director and the co-founder of Gecko “After finishing my formal training, I was extremely lucky to work with inspirational theatre makers like Lindsay Kemp, David Glass, Steven Berkoff and Ken Campbell. It was this 10 year period that fuelled my passion for visual and expressive theatre and also confirmed to me that a new journey must now begin which would enable me to explore a theatre language. I met Al Nedjari in 2001 and Gecko was born. For 8 years we developed our skills and cultivated a very definite and exciting style through the process of making shows and facilitating and leading workshops relating to our style of devising and performance"

Steven Berkoff studied drama and mime in London and in Paris, after opening his own theatre company in 1968 his plays and adaptations were performed all around the world and in different languages. Among the adaptations was Kafka's Metamorphosis and the Trial. He has also directed and toured many of Shakespeare's plays such as Richard II, Hamlet and Macbeth.

You can see the elements of mime both through the make-up and the movement. The make-up is the original mime make-up with the exaggerated mouth and white face, the movement is very descriptive like it is in mime.

They have toured in 20 countries with their 4 award winning productions and now has the foundation to become a leading international physical theatre group.

Amit Lahav - Artistic Director

Kate Sparshatt - Producer

Helen Baggett - Associate Director

Eleanor Hartwell - General Manager

New Wolsey Theatre - Associate Theatre

Dave Price - Music Collaborator

Jackie Shemesh - Lighting Collaborator

Richard Haughton – Photographer

Their Style

(taken from 1^st website)

Physical theatre:

· goes beyond verbal narrative, incorporating physical and visual elements on a level at least equal to verbal elements

· is more than simply abstract movement – it includes some element of character, narrative, relationships, and interaction between the performers, not necessarily linear or obvious

includes a wide variety of styles, approaches, aesthetics – can include dance-theatre, movement theatre, clown, puppetry, mime, mask, vaudeville, and circus

Some helpful quotes:

· "Audiences today want a real experience in their live performance, because they can get great script based entertainment at home, through various new media sources. Traditional theatre, which appeals on a mental, and hopefully also emotional level, has not been enough to compete with other media, and audiences have been declining. Physical theatre, by contrast, appeals to the audience on a physical and emotional level, providing a much more immediate experience than traditional theatre, and audiences here have been growing. Today physical theatre is a broad term which covers the range of circus theatre forms, clown, mime, mask, commedia, visual theatre, and dance theatre." - from www.artmedia.com.au - a physical theatre website from Australia

· "It is NOT that the body says what the voice is saying. I start with what it is not because I find that most people (even folks in the biz) think it IS that you can say with your body what the voice is saying and I think that is redundant. Physical theatre allows the voice to explain the details and the body to control the atmosphere and changes in the metaphysical temperature of the space. In so doing the body (and body is not simply the actor's body but all the physical bodies that the theatre creator controls the shape of: ie her/his own, the stage space, the sound scap, etc.) creates the perpendicular. This perpendicular creates the intersection of the anecdote and the event. The anecdote coming usually from the text and the event coming from all that surrounds the anecdote (all those bodies)." - from Daniel Stein of Dell'Arte, via network member Kali Quinn

· "Theatre is a physical and visual medium, but the play's not always the thing. There is a strand of theatre - the physical and the visual - that speaks a completely different language from the traditional well made play and spans theatre, puppetry, dance and visual arts. This work uses the language of gesture, an area of theatre that in the past was dubbed mime and thought of as entirely silent. Nowadays such pieces frequently include spoken text, but the body speaks as eloquently as the voice, and one of the great strengths of this form is that it can often mine the emotions that fall into the silences between words. Much of this work is devised not scripted, and although many of the UK companies working in this area have been influenced by European traditions, increasing numbers of young companies are developing their own distinct and excitingly high voltage styles." - Lyn Gardner, the Guardian (UK)

Inspiration

· Amit Lahav is the Artistic Director of Gecko “After finishing my formal training, I was extremely lucky to work with inspirational theatre makers like Lindsay Kemp, David Glass, Steven Berkoff and Ken Campbell. It was this 10 year period that fuelled my passion for visual and expressive theatre and also confirmed to me that a new journey must now begin which would enable me to explore a theatre language. I met Al Nedjari in 2001 and Gecko was born. For 8 years we developed our skills and cultivated a very definite and exciting style through the process of making shows and facilitating and leading workshops relating to our style of devising and performance.”

How they create theatre

· “Workshops and residencies play an important part in Gecko's ongoing development as a company - they affirm our style and our process of making work. Education projects focus the company on it's central ideas of performance and play, particularly the emotional physicality of performance. We are able to refine our working methodologies. Occasionally we test out images and ideas in workshops which we hope will surface in future work.” Amit Lahav

The Gecko theatre company explore theatre through workshops and through physical improvisation, this is how they create new theatre, they get ideas from the workshops and further develop these ideas into performances.